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Book-'.H.7 



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Title 



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18— 47372-1 «PO 



sre:ech v// 



OF 



Hon. William Jackson Armstrong 



OF 



PERRIS, CALIFORNIA, 



AtJ-rnOF^ CDF 



Siberia and the Nihilists," "The Masses and the Million- 
aires," "Civil Liberfy," "Castelar and Spain," &c. 



^Ef=^C3l=tE 



THE NATIONAL CONVENTION OF THE PEOPLE'S PARTY 

Omaha, July 4, 1892. 



Price, Five Cents. 

Printed and For Sale by The Bckkley Pkinting CoMPANy- 
Omaha, Neb., to whom all orders should be addressed. 



Xh 



Copyright Secured by William Jackson Armstrong in the 
Office of the Librarian ol Congress, July, 1892. 



5 

tury to a dazzling myth. The idle millionaire 
is prince and lord; industrious poverty is his 
vassal. Not manhood but monopoly guides 
the affairs of the American State. New and 
tremendous forces disordering the distribution 
of wealth and changing the face of the planet 
go unrecognized by learning and ignored of 
law. 

By the common toil of its people this 
nation has advanced "to wealth beyond the 
precedents or the dreams of history. Into 
the scheme of the division of this wealth has 
entered the applied science of the Lousiana 
Lottery. I beg the Lottery's pardon. I do it 
a wrong. That is an honest swindle. One 
hundred thousand thrifty gentlemen playing 
with notched cards against the nation's earn- 
ings have within thirty years drawn out of the 
game more than one-half of the possessions 
of the American people! It is a game they 
understand. A million of honest and willing 
workingmen daily tramp the highways of this 
republic and the streets of its cities hunting 
for the privilege of earning their bread! Ten 
thousand millionaires eat the daily bread 
which they do not earn. A quarter of a mil- 



lion of American working women are starving- 
in garrets and cellars on crusts that would not 
feed the cat of the millionaire. The million- 
aire gorges on the wine and the oil of the land 
while living, and prepares to he under a mar- 
ble mausoleum costing a hundred and lifty 
thousand dollars when he is dead. No dead 
American has a right to lie under a grave- 
stone costing a hundred and fifty thousand 
dollars while a live American woman is 
starving in a garret! 

In the homes of three millions of American 
farmers the extortion of monopoly blights the 
daylight of hope. The railroads have entered 
into an enforced partnership in the profits of 
the farmers' toil — with the farmers underneath 
in the partnership, The imperial lands of the 
west and south are pawned to the princes of 
the east — the gentlemen holding down morocco 
chairs in New York and London. The farmer be- 
comes a tenant and serf on the soil where once 
he was lord. Cunning sits in purple and Labor 
runs in rags. To the best brain of this nation, 
reinforced by forty years of professional expe- 
rience, we give ten thousand dollars a year to 
preside as chief justice of the United States. 



7 

To a successful dry ^oods clerk or a railroad 
manipulator we pay from the earninj^s of the 
people two millions of dollars a year for the 
pure pleasure of being gigantically robbed! 
To-day, under the most primly virtuous ad- 
ministration of this republic in half a century 
— the Administration in pantalettes — we wit- 
ness the spectacle of a cabinet office given for 
the bribe of the largest donation to a cam- 
paign fund in the history of American politics. 
Hereafter it can be said, under Republican 
administrations of this country, at least, that 
the price of a cabinet portfolio to successful 
makers of trousers is a hundred thousand 
dollars! 

In the presence of these appalling injuries 
to the rights of men and of citizens, the ven- 
erable institutions of our civilization are dumb 
with wisdom as the venerable owls of the 
leafy woods. (I apologize to the owls.) The 
church moans of the mysterious ways of 
Providence, and hypnotizes the faithful with 
the glitter of assurance that a certificate of 
virtuous poverty in this world will be honored 
as a bill of credit against the redundant 
riches of the next. The bar mutters of vested 



interests, the rights of property, the sacred- 
ness of capital. Learning murmurs that 
social classes owe nothing to each other. Po- 
litical parties are silent. 

In this crisis it has once more happened in- 
the history of human progress that the teach- 
ings of the people's sorrows have overleaped 
the learning of the schools and confound that 
learning with the spectacle of intolerable 
wrongs. We have therefore met to denounce 
the outrage of common and obvious justice. 
We have met to solemnly protest against the 
barbarous inequalities among classes of citi- 
zens under the flag of Equal Rights — to throt- 
tle the gilded lie in the throat of this republic. 
We have met to indict the savagery of a 
politico-industrial system that turns the toil of 
the masses into the temples of millionaires. 
We have met to affirm that the doctrine of 
unrestricted individual enterprise in the affairs 
of men has exhausted its epoch, and in an 
age unfitted to its theory runs riot to the in- 
jury of mankind. We have met to afBrm that 
unearned riches have no sanctity — that vested 
interests are a myth and the rights of property 
a fiction. We have met to affirm that the 



only sacred thin;;- in this worhl is humanity — - 
that the only thinj;' haxinj;' rights in this world 
is man — that all allegations contrary to these 
are glittering technicalities invented to con- 
found the interrogations of justice for our 
kind. We have met to affirm our deliberate 
judgment that the sorrows of the poor are to 
be relieved by the justice of this world and do 
not await the mysterious judgments of the 
next. We are met to record our modest pref- 
erence for cash payments here to unlimited 
sight drafts on the national banks of the here- 
after. We are met to affirm that the legisla- 
tion of states under which idleness becomes a 
prince and industry a pauper makes the citi- 
zen an enem}' of the commonwealth — makes 
the anarchist and the tramp. We are met to 
affirm that in the solemn bond of interde- 
pendent human communities social classes 
owe to each other everything. We are met 
to assert that the policy of selfishness in the 
industrial scheme of men has proved 
a failure. We are met to affirm that 
for the good citizen and the good man 
there are nobler incentives to serve their gen- 
eration than the lust for gold. From history's 



lO 

twilight, since in the sweat of Egypt's children 
lordly Cheops reared his brow against the 
stars, till this latest noon of time when a new 
world is trodden from sea to sea by civiliza- 
tion's feet of lightning- and of light, the men 
who have fashioned this planet to noble use. 
who, outfacing winter's frost and summer's 
fire, have laid on every zone and on every sea 
the grasp of human knowledge and of power, 
till man, save in length of years, does seem a 
very god of sense and might, these have not 
been the millionaires. They have been the 
lords of brain, the sons of toil, the masses of 
mankind, w^ho, like Him of Nazareth, have 
often had no certain place to lay their head. 
We are met to challenge the lie of civilization 
itself — the preaching of its pulpits denied by 
the practice of its marts. We are here to 
commend to the conscience of Christendom 
the gods of its professed worship — the ethics 
of Christ as the creed of the industrial state. 
The time is propitious. The old parties, 
Republican and Democratic, are dead — dead 
as the dust of Rameses and the Caesars. They 
have not discovered the fact. Their piteous 
ghosts, like the spirit of Hamlet's father, are 



1 1 

doomed for a certain time to walk the earth. 
Re-enacting their scenes of knightly pageantry 
they move in procession, a mournful Mardi- 
Gras. over the surface of the body politic. 
Like the ancient dandy in the comic story, who 
had been a promising young man all his life, 
they have a great future behind them! Those 
pathetic conventions yonder in Minneapolis 
and Chicago! Cheerful stirrings amid the dry 
bones of political cemeteries! Churchyard 
whistlings for courage! They are hunting for 
the offices! Mighty instinct strong in death! 
The war was over a generation ago. State sov- 
ereignty sleeps untroubling in its grave. The 
bloody shirt, carried like the resurrected body 
of the Cid at the head of many curious 
triumphs, lies decently folded and fading in 
the museum of political curiosities. The 
negro, largely contented with his new rights, 
belongs to the classic anthology of party 
debate. The poor old Tariff ! Shades of l^al- 
houn and Jackson! the threshed strawM the 
sleeper's friend! reclaimed from the Repub- 
lic's ancestral shadows and reduced to the 
rattle of a tin cup, furnishes feebly forth 
the dead march music of the funeral train. 



12 



Unlimited silver? a viral spark, betrayed, by 
either ghost — meaningless at best unless 
directed by other forces to the pockets of Toil. 
To these dead we oppose our living. We 
unfurl the banner of the mighty future in the 
temple of American politics. That future is 
justice. We fare here so far forth as to 
resolve that step by step, as times and occa- 
sion permit, to plant in the fundamental 
policies of this nation the principles of ab- 
solute equity for all men. One step from 
the mediaeval barbarism the modern Con- 
science has taken — the protection of the 
feeble from the mailed hand of force. We 
submit to the quickening reason of man- 
kind that the guardianship of the lowly and 
simple from the velvet fingers of Cunning is 
also a trust of the modern state. For the 
crime of this disagreement with the venerable 
judgments of our time we bear the cross of 
its anathema. Ecclesiasticism through its 
oiled priests warns us of the "awful sanctions 
handed down from the beginning" for the pro- 
tection of the plutocrat. Law recites against 
our purpose the precedents of its dusty 
centuries. The University thunders against 
the logic of our creed. Art admonishes that 
we violate the harmonies of the higher civil- 
ization. The Stock Exchange and the mil- 
lionaire threaten the weight of their gold. 
The People's Party is here in the palpitating 



flesh to meet the indictment. To the priest 
we say, " Go learn of your Master, the lowly 
carpenter of Nazareth." To the Law we say, 
" Simplify your precedents to the rule of 
honesty and common sense." To the Univer- 
sity we say, ' ' We are graduates of the learning 
of your cloisters and have entered the world." 
To Art we say, "Give to Labor its hire and 
we will train its children in thy graces and 
praise thy myrtles from the beginnings of 
days." To Wall Street and the millionaire 
we sa}', " ]Fd lolll burst your infer naJ Ixxnn!''' 
To the bankers and the bandits of usury all, 
wreckers of civilization and pauperizers of 
mankind, we say, "The people will issue 
their own bills of credit." 

Our monitors know not the theme of which 
they preach. That which turns the lettered 
wisdom of this period into folly and its legis- 
lation into crime is the fact that they stand for 
an age which has passed away. They linger 
in a generation which knows them not. While 
the college trims its science the world of which 
it dreams has slipped from under its feet — and 
that science has become the wisdom of the 
ancients. That science — that economy whose 
basis was the learning of Ricardo and Smith — 
concerned the creation and the acquisition of 
wealth. But a miracle has, entered human 
labor. The gods of electricity, of steam and 
fire and force, have slain the industrial order 



14 

of the past. Thatoldorderof that old economy 
has vanished as a dream. The giants, the 
Titans of Greek myth, have come again to up- 
bear the earth. The laughter of wheels, the 
music of steam and steel have come to lighten 
the burdens of men. The production of wealth 
has increased a thousand fold. But with this 
increased production have come the appliances 
by which the multiplied wealth created by 
civilized man is plucked from the hands of its 
creators — by which the toil of the many is 
converted to the uses of the few. The once 
independent laborer who exchanged his hand- 
made products with his neighbor has changed 
to the serf of the machine. The citizens of 
this republic, like all the modern peoples, are 
becoming swiftly a nation of employees. The 
genius of man in the nineteenth century has 
outwitted itself! It has enslaved his race! 

Before this gigantic miracle of change the 
learned economies of the schools are as the 
prattle of children — the cooing of sucking and 
helpless babes. The problem of this world is 
no longer the production of wealth, but the 
distribution of the riches created by its colossal 
energies — the equity of the division to the 
creators. In the presence of this problem our 
most venerable critics stand aghast. Let them 
prate: let them carry their dead: let them train 
their corpse: let them rehearse the funeral of 
the past, if they will. That problem is a ghost 



Fellow Americans:— On this sacred day 
of the Republic we are met here at the core 
of the continent to organize civihzation's last 
fight for justice. We are here to re-baptize 
the flag of the stars in the sublime meaning 
of its birth. 

U It is the glory of our kind that there does 
not tread this globe a tribe of men so poor 
or so servile that it does not revolt against 
oppression. It is the superb distinction of 
our Anglo-Saxon race that for eight centuries 
it has led the van of the march for human 
freedom and has never lost the cause of right 
to the oppressor. Neither shall we fail here — 
no more than the barons at Runnymede, no 
more than Cromwell and Hampden, no more 
than Patrick Henry and Washington, no more 
than John Brown and Lincoln. From the 
heights of victory which we fail to conquer 
our children will look back in amazement on 
the storied wrong. 

It is the splendor of our cause that its jus- 
tice is complete, that its issues are more clear 
than the stars of the cloudless night. For 
nineteen hundred vears the civilization which 



we inherit has professed its parentage from 
the Sermon on the Mount. A million of 
church spires over the expanse of Christendom 
mark the sites of its temples of alleged 
faith in the brotherhood of man. A century 
and sixteen years ago — on the immortal date 
pictured on yonder banner — [pointing to the 
standard of the Massachusetts delegation], the 
mighty declaration which gave this Republic 
birth transformed the doctrine of that faith 
from a sentimental abstraction into a practical 
motto for the government of peoples. In the 
face of these facts the industrial policies of 
nations have remained savage and unchanged. 
Under the shadow of the church spires the 
economies of human communities have re- 
mained pagan. Intellectual might and cun- 
ning have remained the law of right, the bat- 
tle of life a grab game — victory for the strong- 
est, the devil for the hindmost. Amid the 
palaces of the rich are heard the groans of 
the starving poor. To the appeal of Lazarus 
Dives answers still, like Cain of old, " I am 
not my brother's keeper." In the teeth of the 
great Declaration the equality of American 
manhood has dwindled at the end of a cen- 



which will not down — the Sph}nx of the modern 
roadway. It stands there, alert, silent, ex- 
pectant. Behind it, in serried ranks, stand 
two hundred millions of the toilers of this 
world! It cannot be laid save by the' sacred 
wand of justice waved in the councils and 
practice of civilized states. There are no 
solved problems that have left out the right. 

It is the people, the masses from their fields 
and forges, the plundered workers of hand and 
brain, who here take up the problem which the 
wisdom of the learned knows not and dares 
not to face. The People's Party! There is 
no longer warfare: there is no longer division. 
The hot brain of Craft, the conservative Con- 
science of Agriculture meet at last in common 
cause — the latest miracle of our time! Hand 
in hand, the farmers and mechanics — the men 
from field and factory and forge are here. 
(The newspaper man is expected to arrive.) 

Under the sun of brotherhood the feuds 
of sections have melted like waxen wings. 
Our brothers of the knightly and generous 
South are here. Yonder [pointing to the 
standards] sit Texas and Tennessee, and 
Alabama and Virginia, and Mississippi and 
Arkansas and Louisiana ! Yonder are the 
loyal sons of Georgia and the Carolinas — the 
old South blent in the new ! They are near 
our hearts. Let them have kingly welcome 
here ! The People's Party ! Americans all, 
and lovers of our common countr^^ we give 



i6 

warning here to the ghosts of dead poHtical 
factions, to obstruction under every masque, 
not that there should be, but that there shall 
be a change. 

With mahce toward no class of our fellow 
citizens we undertake the great mission. We 
shall carve and we shall achieve. Defeat will 
not chill us and derision will fail We have 
entered the lists. We dare the right. We smite 
full on its front the mailed wrong. The world 
is in its callow, barbaric youth. We invoke 
the aid of the brain and heart of our time — of 
all the brave and just. We stretch our hands 
in fraternal sympathy to the struggling 
peoples of the earth. From this heart of the 
continent we look to the four corners of the 
great land. The dawn is creeping on the 
hills! It is the real morning of the world. 
Amid the shadows lifts the vision of the gran- 
der Republic. The struggle of man against 
his fellow has ended : his war is with Nature 
alone. A smile is on every lip. The spectre of 
Fear has been dragged from the homes of all 
the lowly. Upon the Republic's brow, gild- 
ing with the sun, is set the sign of eternal 
hope for man. It is the achievement of the 
Common People ! It has been so written that 
when Religion was dumb, when Art and Law 
and Learning failed, the bronzed hand of 
Labor, which had fashioned the palaces of 
the proud, wrought once again, in love and 
charity, and saved the fortunes of our race ! 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 



013 788 988 2 



